As always, it's usually both worse and not quite as bad as it always sounds.
Yes, power transmission infrastructure is aging. Some area are better than others. Mine has enough storms and winter that the local power companies are on the ball. The freeze and thaw cycles pick off any stragglers in short order. Another issue is you can have multiple generations of equipment, which makes repair and spares interesting. That said, there's been some decent improvements of infrastructure command and control. It'd be harder for entire states to go offline. Fixing everything at once is not economically feasible, nor necessary. All you need to do is have your state's public utility boards or agencies do their job and make sure the power transmission folks are spending what they need to spend.
High debt, yep. This what happens when you spend more on bread and circuses than you take in. You finance it on debt. On the plus side, we are buying most of our own debt. Through Social Security and the Treasury Department. It's so folks don't realize we're financing our fiscal budget with a printing press. Which leads to inflation. Combined with wage stagnation, it's a long term problem we're just starting to really get hit with. Consumer electronics are getting cheaper, luxuries in general are getting cheaper. Necessities are not getting cheaper.
That said, humanity has always left things go until they became a crisis. Roman had issues with people pouring garbage into storm drains, and the folks who should have been inspecting the storm drains were busy on more glamorous stuff. Eventually there was a huge storm, Rome flooded, and then they finally got around to a more permanent fix.
